Thursday, March 15, 2018

MY THEORY ABOUT TRUMP AND HIS FAVORITE TV STARS DIDN'T HOLD UP

Last weekend I read about President Trump's dinner with Fox News commentators Jesse Waters and Sebastian Gorka, and I also read that he was planning to make a lot of personnel changes -- but it didn't seem as if he was planning to raid Fox News to fill the vacancies he intended to create. I had a theory about that:

The reason Trump doesn't just hire Fox pundits for the White House is that he thinks of Fox as the outside world. He doesn't see it as a sycophantic media operation that's essentially a part of the GOP -- he sees it as America. It's the voice of the people. Sean Hannity and Steve Doocy and Pirro and Watters and even Gorka, who used to work for him, are all emissaries from a Main Street America where nearly everyone loves him. He wants them right where they are, reporting back to him from that glorious country.

I was wrong about that. Since then, he's hired Larry Kudlow (not a Fox host, but his CNBC show may as well be on Fox) to head the National Economic Council, he's chosen Heather Nauert, a former host of Fox & Friends, to replace Steve Goldstein, a top State Department aide who was fired on Tuesday (she's been working at the State Department but had no previous diplomatic experience), and he's reported to be considering Pete Hegseth, a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, to take over the Department of Veterans Affairs.

I was clearly confused by reports of White House jobs that seemed unlikely to be filled by right-wing TV personalities. I guessed I missed a couple of obvious points: Trump can't fill every job with people from the TV; many people on TV don't want to give up the money and job stability (which might explain why Judge Jeanine doesn't seem to be on the short list to replace Jeff Sessions -- though who knows?); and Trump has probably been restrained by aides from hiring too many TV personalities. But Trump seems to be overcoming that last problem by simply firing everyone who tries to prevent him from doing whatever he wants. So maybe it will be an all-TV White House fairly soon.